Good progress, but not quite ready for primetime

Good progress, but not quite ready for production use. Here’s why.

These are the issues I’ve found so far, and I’ve only tried to use the plugin for about an hour:

1) After installing the plugin and setting up the first form, it doesn’t show a preview in the Customizer. At the top of the page is only the message “Not Found”. After finding in another topic at https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/small-issues-4/ that Permalinks are required to be re-saved, the preview appeared. This is not a very smooth workflow.

2) The preview doesn’t correctly use the theme. I’m using a child theme of Twenty Fourteen, so not some weird nonstandard theme. In the child I reverse the colors so that I have a dark background and light text. The Customizer preview was unreadable, with black text on a black background. Even after tweaking the individual element colors, some elements (like radio buttons) get the wrong colors, so will have to tweak with CSS. Colors should just follow the theme. That is, don’t set any colors by default. Let the theme do the work unless it’s absolutely necessary to do an override.

3) Title placement should be for the entire form, so get rid of the UI in each section, which only complicates the UI. Having some titles above and some below would be a very inconsistent and confusing UI design. Same for colors, actually, which 99% of the time should be consistent for the entire form. The submit button color is OK to be customized, but if the theme is any good it will set button colors as well.

4) I tested the form intentionally with a wrong confirmation email and the form correctly said the emails don’t match, but then it blanked all the fields. This is unusable because then you can’t see what was mis-typed and correct it. This was mentioned in the other topic.

5) Make optional the reply email to the submitter. Many people don’t want an email saying a site got their email. Saying on the site that it was received is sufficient, which the plugin already does. In addition, the confirmation email sends using the same email that is used to receive the email from the site. This is often not desired, so making the confirmation email optional would solve this issue.

6) The email sent by the plugin is really bare bones, with no formatting or even vertical spacing. Also, unfilled optional fields are sent. These are not big deals.

Great progress so far, the plugin holds promise, but you actually have to test features after you add them. It’s also necessary to test all combinations of the features to spot any regressions.

Best of luck!